There is a phenomenon that happens sometimes in a movie. A lot of movies have plot holes, right? We all agree that plot holes are bad but sometimes when you’re watching a movie and trying to fill those plot holes yourself, you realize that this movie your watching has solved all of it’s plot holes.
How do I describe this? Imagine you are a puzzle designer. You design puzzles for a living. You’re not an artist, you decide the way the image is cut up. You and all of your peers in the puzzle design community all have one thing you all hate. Every time you gather around the water cooler there’s about a 60% chance that someone is gonna complain about how mysterious and annoying this problem is. The problem is that puzzle pieces get lost so easily.
The puzzle research division has released a statement. Look how cute it is. They even have their own lingo.
“We, the experts on lines, blades, and the optics of fibers, have researched this subject thoroughly. Our findings are conclusive. We will compare our findings with the results of a poll we did online last week.
Question: “What percentage of the time does a puzzle lose a piece? In other words, at the end of a puzzles First Life, what chance is there that its already missing a piece?’
You guys answered the poll saying you think a puzzle loses a piece 76% of the time. We find this number to be amusingly dramatic. In actuality, if you remove the numbers taken from Level 9 houses or, houses with more than 3 pets or more than 6 children, you find that the number is much less concerning. On the First Life of a puzzle a piece is lost only 24% of the time. To you, it feels like 76% because those times where a piece is lost are always remembered.
We have even investigated the cause of these psychological patterns. The truth is that you silly Puzzle Design Community members actually WANT to lose pieces. Isn’t it so much more exciting to lose a piece? Doesn’t that make it more interesting to you? We ourselves see the temptation to feel that way. Somebody in the family has to have accidentally dropped it at some point. The mystery of who did it or how is so exciting.
Obviously, we are of a higher order than you since we are the experts. Therefore we make a concerted effort to keep all the pieces. There should be no joy taken from familial discord. Grow up.
Lovingly Yours, The Puzzle Illuminati”
You however, are not a part of this Puzzle Bougiouse. How the fuck do you spell that word? You’re far more open minded than those clout chasing Puzzle Bougeoisy. Maybe you spell that part “geoisie”? Anyway, you pride yourself on creativity and you use that creativity to think of an amazing solution to the problem. You simply ask, how do we use the problem as the solution.
You’re brilliant and wonderful.
Your solution is to make a puzzle that mixes in empty spaces. Obviously, the simple use of negative space by a puzzle should be innovation enough but you’re no one trick pony. You realize that with today’s modern material sciences you could probably make some puzzle pieces that are clear. You spend time with an artist, (gross, artists are lame), to create an “abstract” art piece, whatever that means. Your next idea is to design the cuts of the puzzle so that some of the empty spaces are identical in shape. Your shameful and disgusting “Artist” uses repetition as the key concept point for the art. Your idea BTW. When you cut the puzzle you will actually design it in a way that multiple pieces can fit into multiple places on the puzzle. If you have maybe 75 out of a 1,000 piece puzzle be either clear, non existent, or interchangeable and then you incorporate that into the art then you have infinite possibility puzzles. Every Life of the puzzle produces a different image. You really are a fucking genius. Like, wow actually. That’s a good idea right?
Anyway, you become incredibly successful, obviously. You make a bajillion dollars and everybody loves you. You’re so happy now. You’re at the top of the Puzzle game. You have more clout than all those Science Nerds combined. You put puzzles back into popular culture in a big way. ‘Infinity Puzzles’ start to replace every day items all over the place. As the concept is developed and perfected by your beautiful brain it becomes a primary way for many other people to express themselves. They make their own art with the puzzles. The puzzle has become a medium through which other creations are born.
But, you start to notice that things don’t exactly feel right. You went through all this trouble to develop this new technique but now the rest of the Puzzle Design Community is using it as a crutch. You realize that your puzzle doesn’t actually require any serious effort beyond the conceptual level. Creating an abstract piece of art is incredibly simple. Now, a bunch of people are talking about a hypothetical Super Puzzle where all the puzzles pieces are exactly the same shape so they can be as interchangeable as possible and there are no border pieces so everyone just adds pieces at random to see what it looks like as it grows.
FUCK THAT!!! You didn’t design the Infinity Puzzle for it to be used as a stepping stone for people with no original idea in the first place. Sure, maybe the puzzles get more digestible to casual puzzle fans but Overall Puzzle Quality, otherwise known as the OPQ rating, is dropping like a rock. Puzzle Minimalism actually makes money and that means everyone wants in. All your dreams of being an incredibly wealthy version of Philip Glass are dead. When your thing makes money everyone wants in. That minimalism is gonna be used as a crutch by simplistic people trying to make a quick dollar or grab some quick fame. As soon as that becomes their reason they’re dead inside! Those mother fuckers can’t take any of YOUR clout away from you. You won’t let em.
What did I originally start writing this post about? Oh yeah. Sometimes a movie will get “lucky” and all of it’s missteps and errors can all become useful by some simple mechanic in the movie’s design.
The movie Hero begins with the main character, Hero, sitting in front of the King of China.
Hero, sitting there on the left is telling the story to the King and Hero’s story has lot’s of melodrama in it because he believes that is what the King wants to hear. Everybody thinks the King is a tyrant and so Hero’s version of the story is emotional, hateful, bloody, and sexual. The twist after the first section of the movie is that the King then tells his own idea of how the story actually happened. The cinematography changes from blood red scenes and veiled faces to blue and poetic. The King’s version of the story is still melodramatic but it’s filled with honor, love, sacrifice, and virtue. Afterwards the true version of events is revealed and everything changes again.
The point is this. The movie is kind of boring for the first half with most of the characters seeming basic and childish. The action scenes are flashy with colors and grunts but they’re a little bit confusing. You understand what’s going on but somehow there’s a bit of apathy in you and that makes things confusing, of course. The action tries to be meta. Think, whirlwinds of brightly colored leaves or blankets of jet black Imperial arrows falling from the sky. Think entire fights that happen inside people’s heads.
But, the movie can actually turn all of those problems with pacing or into a source of information. All of the boring angry-lovers scenes, idiotic revenge trips and seductions, all of it, fight scenes that are more interpretive dance than fight scene, anything at all that a person might dislike. These things work because the story is just Hero’s falsified version of the truth, with the purpose to fool the king. All of those parts of the movie I find boring are actually turned into fascinating character insight. We can see exactly what story Hero come’s up with. We can analyze why Hero might have those characters act like they’re in a Greek tragedy for the first half of the movie. Hero thinks the King wants those types of things in his story because he doesn’t know the King.
In turn, as the King tells the version of events he believes is true the boring or melodramatic scenes and lines in the movie become an expose on the character of the King. When two people tell you very different versions of the truth you can learn alot about them as a people.
The movie, because of this design, can basically do whatever it wants to do. The movie can get away with anything. It could have a scene be terrible and boring but that’s ok because they are choices being made by the characters. It’s exciting, well done, and expressive of the characters. The movie has somehow turned any possible screw up, mistake, plot hole or error into a commentary on the character telling the story. It’s brilliant.
Sometimes a movie accomplishes something like that. Another example is Hackers. What parts of Hackers are comedy and what parts aren’t. Personally I think it’s basically all comedy, and seen like that the movie is great. If you think it’s serious it’s still really funny I guess, but it changes the movie alot.
I’m getting kinda tired of writing and I’ve had “In The Heat Of The Night” on pause for the last hour. I’ll just change the title to Random Thoughts since I got off topic with the puzzle thing. That puzzle stuff was pretty funny though. Actually, I’ll call it “Two Problems Turned Into Solutions”. That’s a terrible title. Fuck it, no one reads these anyway.
The Mind of Joshypoo 